I thought I would pass along this little gemstone that I stumbled across on Tumblr. I am really digging on Kyle Jones’ Space Cadet – and the rest of his work for that matter! His work reminds me of something straight outta Hanna-Barbera Productions circa the 1960s. I am particularly fond of the marshmallow clouds against the red horizon. I still can’t place the green rabbit friend of the cadet, but if this what the future looks like, I’m really excited.

Bobby passed along these drawings to me by Jonathan Andrew Taylor. I may be mistaken, but I believe the top image was inspired by Hubert Vykukal’s AX-3 experiment suit (which Alex wrote about a while back). The AX hard body suits were heralded because they gave the body almost complete range of motion; an astronaut could move into something like 95% of the body positions that they could if they were in the buff. Although, Taylor’s drawings make the suit seem rather limiting with the astronaut barely capable of peaking over the bottom of his helmet. I’m fond of the tri-color palette that Taylor employs. Stripping the suit of its standard patriotic colors, he recasts the image into another a sphere. It’s as if Taylor’s astronauts have complete range of motion in capturing a child-like pursuit of imagination.

Stan Gaz’s series Ensnared – Astronauts and Butterflies, explores the themes of “loss, memory, transition, and transformation.” His images depict archetypes of the hunter and the hunted, though it’s hard to tell which figures are really trapped. Is it the astronaut in his white, sterile suit or the delicate butterfly? Seeing this series made me think of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir The Diving Bell & the Butterfly. Bauby, physically crippled by locked-in syndrome, uses the extended allusion of the diving bell (much like a space suit) to illustrate his oppressive state and still his mind is able to take flight like a butterfly. In Gaz’s artist statement, he states, “The roles can be oddly interchangeable, caught up in a cycle in which each is trapped by the other—where neither is ever free of the other’s influence, but nevertheless transformation still takes place.”

We can never get enough of space suits here on TFIB, so it’s only right that I share the work of Señor Salme. His illustration style reminds me a lot of P. Craig Russell, a comic book artist who’s a classic in the industry. But Senor Salme’s work is a nice variation on Russell’s work, also having a touch of Mike Mignola as bit of a manga influence to round things out.

He clearly loves space suits as much as we do, as he’s got three images in his portfolio that explore the idea of astronauts. I’m really loving what he’s doing, I’d suggest checking out more of his work by clicking here.

The French ambient duo AIR’s newest project, Le Voyage Dans la Lune, is a soundtrack for a voyage beyond the stratosphere.

Le Voyage Dans la Lune (translated as A Trip to the Moon) is a seminal French silent film from 1902 directed by Georges Méliès. It was the first science fiction film ever produced, loosely based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H.G. Well’s The First Men In the Moon. There was a version of the film that was hand-painted that was lost for decades, but was found in 1993, and massive efforts to restore the work of art were begun.

In coordination, the Fondation Groupama Gan and Fondation Technicolor asked AIR to score a new soundtrack to the restored version, which you can hear a bit of in the clip above. In 2011, AIR released a new album titled Le Voyage Dana la Lune, which was ultimately inspired by the project.

The soundtrack is definitely a departure from AIR’s earlier sounds. More raw, more evident that there is a human beyond the scenes detailed layers of sound. The album is a work of art, dark but flawlessly executed in typical AIR fashion.

Seems like the news is full of bitter Americans, though Ham the Chimpanzee, the first chimpanzee launched into outer space in 1961, has to be one of the most bitter in history. British artist Joe Wilson produced the above package design for San Francisco based brewery 21st Amendment’s Bitter American Seasonal Ale. It’s a nice, cheeky alternative to traditional alcoholic product packaging which can sometimes take itself too seriously. I know what I’ll be grabbing next time I pop down to the corner store.

The Chinese have a long history of space travel, dating back all the way to the late 50s. So finding a cool space suit definitely wasn’t a problem. The space suit above was created by Wu Ershan as a part of a series called Nomadic Plan in Outer Space. The suits are meant to represent the nomadic lifestyle of the Mongolian people.

I love how the space suit looks, almost like a space age bushido. The layered plates on the shoulders and legs are not only beautiful ornamentally, but also look like they could protect the wearer quite sufficiently. The porthole in the face mask along with the grill kind of look like a smiling face though, which is in contrast to the rest. Perhaps one day we’ll see something like these in 20 or 30 years?

I wanted to revisit his work and put a spotlight on his larger series of cosmonauts done in oil because I find his work rather… gravitating. Jeremy’s cosmonauts series is split; half are depicted in the familiar concrete transportation frontier, crashing to city streets or floating underneath highway overpasses while the other is shown in a soft monochromatic void. Both parts to his series feel interchangeable as if they were captured in sublime silence.

The works reminded me of this Gemini transmission between Gemini IV Astronauts Ed White & James McDivitt after White completed NASA’s first ever spacewalk: